Ernest Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea - 1952 - Short Synopsis

The Old Man and the Sea is the story of an epic struggle between an old man and a big fish. Santiago is the very old Cuban fisherman whose been unable to catch a fish for eighty four days. Santiago has an apprentice called Manolin. Manolin adores the old man but his parents tell him he must stop fishing with Santiago because he is not catching any fish or making any money.

Santiago is convinced one day he will begin to catch fish again and that he is just going through an unlucky time but his luck will change. Manolin takes the old man food and baitfish to help him to keep fishing.

Hemingway's story tells of the day that Santiago takes his skiff (boat) out much farther into the sea than usual, thinking if he goes into deeper waters he will catch a fish. Santiago ventures far into the Gulf Stream. He prepares his lines and drops them. At noon, a big fish, which Santiago knows to be a Marlin because he's a very knowledgeable and experienced fisherman, takes the bait at 100 fathoms. The old man expertly hooks the fish, but cannot pull it in. Instead, the fish begins to pull the boat. The old man, Santiago is unable to simply tie the line fast to the boat because the fish might break the line, so he holds the fish fast by himself. The strain of holding the large fish bends the old man's shoulders and back but he holds on to the line, trying to control the large Marlin fish.

Santiago holds onto the fish for two days and two nights. It swims steadily northwest until at last it tires and swims east with the current. Santiago endures constant pain from the fishing line. The line is cutting into his hands, his back is strained and bent and his shoulders are exhausted with the struggle with the fish.. Whenever the fish lunges, leaps, or makes a dash for freedom, the line pulls through Santiago's hands and cuts them badly.

As he struggles, the old man feels a deep empathy and admiration for the marlin. He admires the courage and determination of the fish to escape. On the third day the fish tires and Santiago, exhausted, having had no sleep for three nights and in deep pain because of the strength he has had to show to control the fish somehow manages to pull the Marlin close enough to his boat for him to thrust a harpoon in its body. He kills the fish. It's the largest fish Santiago has ever seen. He lashes it to the craft, raises the small mast, and man and fish sail for home together.

Blood pours from the wounded Marlin's body and leaves a trail of blood in the water. Sharks, attracted by the blood inevitably appear. The old man fights the sharks off as best he can. He kills a few but this attracts more sharks. When darkness falls it is impossible for Santiago to fight off the sharks anymore. They devour the Marlin, leaving only the skeleton of the fish, its head, and its tail.

Santiago admonishes himself for going out to far into the ocean. He gets back to his home and collapses on his bed. Totally exhausted. The next morning, a crowd of amazed fisherman gather around the skeletal carcass of the fish, still lashed to the boat. Manolin, who has been worried sick at the old man's absence, is moved to tears to find Santiago safe in his bed. The boy watches over the old man's sleep. When the old man wakes, he and Manolin agree to fish together again. The old man falls asleep once more. That afternoon, tourists observe the remains of the giant marlin and mistake it for a shark.

FOOTNOTE - This is an aricle written by Stephen Kinzer after the death of Gregorio Fuentes (who was perhaps the model for Santiago in 'The Old Man and the Sea')

This article was published in the New York Times January 28th 2002

The Old Man Who Loved the Sea, and Papa By STEPHEN KINZER OAK PARK, Ill., Jan. 28 - When the leathery old body of Gregorio Fuentes, Ernest Hemingway's fishing companion and confidant, finally gave out earlier this month in Cuba, the sadness spread back here to the Chicago suburb where Hemingway was born and raised.

There was the sense of an era ending, a door closing. Hemingway's youngest sister survives, as does one of his sons, but few others now alive can claim to have known him well.

"The necrology is kind of ominous, with two of his sons passing away in the last year or so and now Gregorio," said Scott Donaldson, president of the Hemingway Society. "It reminds you of how far back in time he was. He's been dead for more than 40 years now."

Hemingway always admired and often wrote about men like Gregorio Fuentes, whom he found wise, courageous, close to nature and blessed with innate nobility. During the years that Hemingway spent in Cuba, when he evolved from a gifted writer into a myth-shrouded giant who dominated and defined a generation, he spent many afternoons on his boat in the company of Fuentes.

But even in recent years, when he was much sought after by tourists, Fuentes kept his employer's secrets.

"He liked to tell stories, but he was also pretty circumspect," said Scott Schwar, executive director of the Hemingway Foundation here, who met Fuentes several times during the last years of his life. "He never really got into gossiping, although he certainly would have been able to."

Hemingway and Fuentes were bound together by a passion for fishing. The open sea formed the backdrop for a great literary career and for the enduring Hemingway legend, a legend that some scholars now say is nonsense.

Fuentes was a born seaman who rode out four hurricanes, swam through shark-infested waters to rescue a drowning man and could feel in his bones precisely where the biggest marlin, sailfish and tarpon would be running, or so Hemingway asserted. In a 1949 article, Hemingway said that his own role on their boat was to hook the prey and then "gradually work him closer and closer and then in to where Gregorio can gaff him, club him and take him onboard." Fuentes was born in the Canary Islands sometime between 1897 and 1899. There are different accounts of how he met Hemingway, one having to do with a storm in the Gulf of Mexico from which the two men found shelter together. In any case they struck up an acquaintance, and around the time Hemingway settled in Cuba in 1939, he hired Fuentes as his boatman.

"I know that he would rather keep a ship clean and paint and varnish than he would fish," Hemingway once wrote. "But I know too that he would rather fish than eat or sleep."

The boat on which the two spent countless hours, the Pilar, was 34 feet long, made of American black oak and had a cruising range of 500 miles. Hemingway paid the Wheeler Shipyard in Brooklyn $7,500 for her in 1934, $3,000 of which was advanced by Arnold Gingrich, editor of Esquire, as payment for future articles.

The writer and actor George Plimpton had less than happy memories of one fishing expedition on the Pilar. "We were out all day and didn't catch anything except a barracuda," he recalled. "It cut somebody's hand - I forget who - and it was a real mess, blood all over the hold."

Much serious fishing was done aboard the Pilar, and much else as well. Jeffrey Meyers, a Hemingway biographer, recently described it as "kind of a floating whorehouse and rum factory as well as a fishing boat."

Fuentes never said anything like that, but he did offer a few glimpses of Hemingway's drinking habits. He had inclusive tastes but favored Gordon's gin above all. Whenever possible he drank only from freshly opened bottles.

On many of their trips, Fuentes told stories that he had heard in seaside towns around the Caribbean, and some of them may have worked their way into Hemingway's fiction. He claimed to have been a model for the weather-beaten fisherman in "The Old Man and the Sea," a claim that some biographers say is at least partly true.

"The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck," Hemingway wrote of his fisherman, words that could easily have described Fuentes. "The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert."

During most of the 20 years when Cuba was his home - longer than he lived anywhere else - Hemingway presided over a hilltop estate called Finca Vigía, where hummingbirds flitted among the mango trees. He rose early and spent mornings at work, standing at his typewriter wearing a favorite pair of oversized moccasins. For lunch he would sometimes visit La Terraza in nearby Cojímar, where his boat was moored, or drive to Havana, a few miles away, to visit one of his two favorite bars, the Floridita or the Bodeguita del Medio. Nights were for reading or entertaining.

As often as possible Hemingway broke away from his work to answer the call of the sea, which meant the call of Fuentes and the Pilar.

"His life on that boat was certainly one of the things he enjoyed most, aside from his work," said his son, Patrick Hemingway, who lives in Montana. "I do think that in Cuba they've made too much about Gregorio being the one who taught Ernest Hemingway all he knew about fishing. That's not so. But my dad had a lot of respect for people who find simple but honorable lives, and he saw that in Gregorio."

When Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in 1954, he told Fuentes, "We will have very much money now." That turned out to be true, but there was another consequence. Visitors began turning up uninvited at Finca Vigía, sometimes by the dozen. Fuentes took on a new job, ferrying Hemingway and his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, to an abandoned cay where they could bathe and Hemingway could work uninterrupted.

In July 1960 Hemingway left Finca Vigía and, after stops in New York and Madrid, landed in Idaho, where he had bought a house on 17 acres of land. The following spring, an American-backed force of exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs. It was a shattering event for Hemingway writer, because it marked the final break between the United States and Cuba, and therefore the impossibility of his return to the home he loved.

Some scholars say this realization may have helped propel him toward suicide, which he attempted for the first time on the very day news of the Bay of Pigs invasion was reported. He took his life on July 2, 1961.

Soon after, fishermen in Cojímar decided to erect a bust of the American who had lived among them. There was no metal available, so they contributed old propellers, deck ornaments and whatever else they could spare. It was melted down, and the resulting monument was unveiled on the first anniversary of his death in Cojímar's dusty main square, where it still stands.

Finca Vigía, now owned by the Cuban government, remains almost exactly as Hemingway left it. Bottles of Cinzano, their wrappers dry and bleached, are still in the wine rack. Books spill from shelves, even in the bathroom. Researchers have discovered that he annotated about one- third of them, and are now compiling his notes in search of new insights. Walls and floors are covered with animal head and skins that Hemingway brought home from safaris in Africa.

The house has a distinctly masculine feel, and fits the traditional image of Hemingway as a man's man for whom hunting, fishing, boxing and bullfighting were the purest of pursuits. That image is now under withering attack.

"There's been a total change in the field, a huge reaction against the old conventional wisdom," said Susan Beegel, editor of The Hemingway Review. "It's not a reaction against Hemingway, but against the male critics and scholars of an earlier era who created this one-dimensional macho image of him."

"These days, people are writing about how real and complex his female characters are, how sensitively he portrayed romantic relationships, and how ambivalent he really was about manhood and gender," Ms. Beegel said. "Feminist and gay-oriented scholars have discovered him with a vengeance. It's really amazing to see how positively a lot of them view him."

After Hemingway's death Fuentes continued to work when he could, both as a fisherman and charter captain. Hemingway left the Pilar to him, but soon the Cuban government placed it on dry-land display at Finca Vigía. Whether Fuentes donated the vessel freely or under duress remains unclear.

Like the rest of Cuba, Cojímar drifted into isolation after Fidel Castro's revolution and the American trade sanctions that followed. More than a few boats have left its harbor under cover of night for desperate runs to Florida. But unlike other local fishermen, Fuentes had something to fall back on: his memories of Hemingway. They gave him celebrity status and allowed him to live differently from his neighbors.

"Gregorio is possibly the only fisherman in the world who owns authentic Robert Capa and Karsh photos," the Cuban author Norberto Fuentes (no relation) once observed. "Karsh's famous portrait of Hemingway hangs in his living room."

When tourism to Cuba picked up in the 1990's, Finca Vigía became an attraction once more. Visitors could look through open doors and windows but not actually enter the house. Those wishing to take photographs were sometimes charged $5 a shot.

Tour buses that made the trip to Finca Vigía often stopped at La Terraza, where Hemingway favored the shrimp and crab dishes. There Fuentes was the top attraction. He began charging $50 to spin 15 minutes worth of yarns about his days with Papa, speaking in Spanish with a cigar between his teeth.

Sometimes his stories were about fishing trips, like one on which the writer supposedly landed a 1,542- pound marlin. Other times they would have a literary aspect, as when he told a journalist about the night Hemingway was considering titles for his famous novella. "I said to him, `Look, its about an old man. And it's about the sea.' And Papa said, `Yes, that's it!' "

Here in Oak Park, where Hemingway did his first writing and where the name E. Hemingway is inscribed among others at the base of a memorial to local men who served in World War I, a museum to his memory draws more than 10,000 visitors each year.

Its prize exhibit is the famous breakup letter he received from Agnes von Kurowsky, the 26-year-old American nurse he fell in love with while he was a teenager recovering from his war wound at a Milan hospital. She became the model for Catherine Barkley, the beautiful English nurse in "A Farewell to Arms" who treats and loves an American soldier hospitalized in Italy.

"I know that I am still very fond of you, but, it is more as a mother than as a sweetheart," she wrote. "I can't get away from the fact that you're just a boy - a kid. I somehow feel that some day I'll have reason to be proud of you, but, dear boy, I can't wait for that day."

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